


Died to Tell the Tale

by cuddlesome



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Femslash February, Force Ghosts, References to Drugs, Sad, do you like feeling sad?, let's hope so!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 06:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6069310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlesome/pseuds/cuddlesome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey meets the ghost of a senator-queen from an age long forgotten who tells her of adventure, deception, and death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Died to Tell the Tale

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning, this story starts out relatively light and then takes a nosedive. Additionally, I'm not providing a reason Padmé can manifest as a force ghost other than "because I want her to". Sorry about that blatant middle finger to canon, but Padmé is worth it.
> 
> Happy femslash February <3

Rey's first thought when she sees the translucent, blue-edged woman outside her home is that she has been drugged. She would not put it past any of the shady strangers that she traded with for supplies from on Niima Outpost to give her food with fillers that would make her sick. Cursing her luck, she rounds the side of the AT-AT she calls home. Rey considers whether or not she should try puking up whatever had the hallucinogen, quarter-full stomach clenching with the prospect, when the apparition speaks.

"This planet reminds me of someone from another desert planet.”

Rey turns and considers the woman for a moment, two fingers already primed to be shoved down her throat. The woman’s gaze is focused far away in the distance. She is fingering a small totem in her hand, but her fingers close over it when Rey tries to get a closer look.

"Where was that?" Rey finally asks, lowering her poised fingers.

"Tatooine. It was a terrible place, but that someone made it all worth it for me.”

Tatooine? Was she referring to Luke Skywalker? Rey’s brow wrinkles in confusion, then she gives up on trying to sort out the logic of a drug-induced hallucination. The woman is very beautiful, in a confident, aristocratic sort of way. Her bearing demands respect, keeping her shoulders back and head raised at all times; all of it belying her slight height. There are flowers Rey has never seen before in her long, wavy hair.

“I’ve heard that Tatooine is nicer than Jakku, but that’s not saying much.”

If she is going to entertain talking to a semi-transparent person, she might as well be polite.

The woman finally turns to look at her. "You remind me of both that someone and his master, with that accent."

"His slave master?"

Rey's nose wrinkles at the prospect. Perhaps the woman thinks of that as some sort of a compliment, but she certainly does not.

The woman giggles in a way that seems too young for her age, shaking her head. Her posture is still ramrod straight, but at the same time, Rey feels that she has relaxed somewhat.

"No, no. His Jedi Master. Though he also had a slave master at one point." Her smile falters, then comes back, like a flickering candle flame. “I could tell you about them, if you’d like. But it’s a very long story… and it doesn’t have a happy ending.”

At the mention of Jedi, Rey thinks to herself that this is the best drug-induced trip she has ever been on. Then she invites the apparition into her home. Why not? It will be a good story in addition to her story of how traders drugged her on the off-chance she remembers any of it the next day.

Upon walking into the AT-AT, Rey shoves some of her treasures into a corner, explaining that she did not expect guests and has not had them in… ever. To cover up the unintended confession and ward off the sympathetic expression from the apparition, Rey asks her name. She introduces herself as Padmé. Rey wonders where her subconscious had drudged up such a pretty name.

“Now, I believe you promised me a story about these Jedi that I resemble,” Rey sits down on her makeshift bed, folding her legs and patting the spot next to her.

“I didn’t promise, I offered,” Padmé retorts, but sits down next to her anyway, sweeping her hair to one side. “I’m already starting to regret it.”

“Well it’s too late now, you’ve got my interest. The legends about Jedi are my favorites.”

Padmé’s eyebrows raise and for the first time she frowns. Rey wonders if wherever she is from they consider the stories about Jedi are considered little more than children’s fairy tales, as storytellers on Jakku so often told her whenever she requested them.

“I know, it’s silly,” Rey says, waving a hand, “but I’ve heard about them ever since I was a child and I love imagining those heroic warrior monks really existed.”

Padmé nods slowly. “I see. Well in that case, I’ll have to tell you the story. It began when—”

“Wait!” Rey blurts.

Padmé raises her eyebrows again, but has a smile playing on the edges of her lips this time. “Yes?”

“You have to start properly.”

“Oh? And how would I do that?”

Rey makes a sweeping motion with her hands and says in her most dramatic voice: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

It was the way every storyteller on Jakku began stories about the Jedi, a tradition that Rey believes needs to be upheld. She feels excitement prickle in the back of her neck whenever she hears those words. Padmé acquiesces and begins. The phrase has even more weight to it in her pretty, clear voice, and she projects it as if she has a larger audience than just Rey.

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” She says, and the flowers in her hair twinkle as if they are the stars themselves.

It is a story about Jedi and the Old Republic. Much to Rey’s pleasure, it is one she has never heard before. Most stories are about the Empire and as much as she loves hearing about Luke Skywalker, the new characters are also interesting to hear about.

Padmé tells her about the “someone” she had mentioned in the barest of terms, referring to him as “Ani” and his master as just that, “his master” and sometimes as “his friend” or even “his brother”. Other placeholders are similarly put in for countless names. “Senator” and “queen” are used interchangeably to refer to one character to the point that Rey blends them together. Rey understands, the story sounds ancient and lengthy enough that it makes sense Padmé would not remember every single name.

Rey finds that she cannot see how the story can have anything but a happy ending—it is about a slave being freed, daring adventures, and Sith being killed left and right. And, though Rey does not take as much interest in it, there is a scandalous romance, too. Padmé seems to really like those parts, so Rey does not ask her to skip through them.

Padmé tells it all with a voice that stays mostly-steady, wavering only during the happiest and saddest parts. Rey is leaning toward her the whole time, enjoying both the story and the sight of Padmé’s face. Her full lips, her tiny nose, her big, deep brown eyes, filling with tears—

Rey blinks as she realizes the last detail and at the same time the story comes to an abrupt end.

“Then the Separatists were killed, the Jedi systematically wiped out, and the Republic turned into the Galactic Empire,” Padmé concludes, stiffly, then adds, “The end.”

Padmé’s tears are gone and Rey wonders if she had just imagined them, then reminds herself she is imagining all of it—she is not sure she believes it anymore, but she tells herself anyway. Her assurance of her wild imagination does not stop her from questioning the end of the story, though.

“That can’t be right,” Rey says, “The Jedi couldn’t have all been wiped out, or there would have been no Obi-Wan Kenobi or Yoda to teach Luke Skywalker.”

“They barely escaped death and hid out. I assumed you knew that part.”

“There’s something more to this story, isn’t there?” Rey says, fixing Padmé with a stern look, who meets it. “I can handle it.”

“But I don’t know if I can.” Padmé has that sadness about her again, crumpling her poise like the sudden hunch to her spine.

“Padmé, I want to know what really happened. Please?”

Without thinking, Rey reaches for her hand. Her hand passes through Padmé’s blue-haloed one with a rippling sensation, the smell of ozone, and an intense heat that in all her years in the desert she has never felt. Padmé’s lips part and all at once the sight of her and Rey’s home are ripped away.

The next sensation that Rey feels comes to her in a sudden, sharp, realization: she cannot breathe.

Something is crushing her windpipe. Rey reaches up to scratch at what is blocking her throat, only to realize there is nothing there. Her mouth gapes and she stares at the rapidly-blurring image in front of her. A young man with his pupils blown wide, but not quite far enough to disguise the sickly yellow in his iris. His hand is lifted up toward her, fingers all bent in claws as he bares his teeth at her.

Her last bit of breath goes into whimpering a name she does not know.

There is respite in which she is blissfully unaware of anything but blackness. It is brief. Then there is pain rippling through her body in steady convulsions.

And as Rey feels herself—feels Padmé—giving life to her children and dying herself, she hears Padmé’s voice in the back of her mind.

“You wanted to know, so I’ll tell you.” Her voice is somber, but no less regal. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

Padmé begins to tell her another story. It is a story which is different from the last and yet, paradoxically, very much the same. A light story with a dark edge. A story of deception, well-meaning and cruel alike, where good did not triumph over evil in the end. The tragedy of a boy becoming a monster in an effort to save the one he loved and the galaxy paying the price for it.

Padmé tells her the true names. Rey does not know what to think when Padmé says Obi-Wan Kenobi is the master-friend-brother and that Padmé herself is the senator-queen. Only the hero-villain retains a nickname. She still calls him “Ani” even after she tells how he choked her, was killing her, became an evil creature in mind and body. She refuses to call him what Rey knows he is in the end: Darth Vader.

Rey feels sick. Her screams intermingle with the babies’. Padmé’s babies. Ani’s babies. In spite of all the pain, Rey finds it in herself to hope they are all right.

Padmé appears in front of her, her beauty looking all wrong in the clinical setting of the labor room, her sad calm a sharp contrast to the worried look on the face of the bearded, robed man leaning toward her.

Padmé tells Rey, regal voice breaking, “Don’t let your story end the way mine did, Rey.”

The senator-queen leans down to kiss her, then. At once, Rey feels all the stars in the universe and the darkness between them.

And then it is over.

Rey sits up in her bed, all evidence of what transpired gone save for phantom pains in her throat and belly and tears on her cheeks. There is a sandstorm going on outside, blowing sand in thick whirls into her shelter. Rey stares at the sand piling up near her door for a long moment before woodenly standing up and going to stretch a sturdy skin she had scraped together rations to trade for across the opening into the AT-AT. At once, her shelter is thrown into shadow. Ignoring the absurd urge to open the door back up if only to let some light in along with the sand, Rey retreats back to her bed.

She has come down from the drugs that the traders had put in her food, Rey rationalizes, trying to stop her shaking. She wraps her arms around herself in an effort to stop the dull ache in her middle. Then she is well and truly sick, throwing up what little is in her stomach.

When she sits back up, her eyes are no better adjusted to the dark in her home. Even still, Rey thinks she sees pinpricks of light. They twinkle for a split second before the darkness swallows them all up.


End file.
